Posts by Doctor Syntax 33095 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"that powder you strongly suspect to be bits of ground-up teeth"
But probably dental stone, plaster of Paris which sets particularly hard. I used to visit a dental supplier in Belfast to get supplies of it which we issued to Scenes of Crime Officers.*
Eventually it transmogrified into a combined dental supplier and video hire shop, VHS being a new thing. I asked the owner which was the more profitable line. He didn't actually say but it turned out he wasn't happy about the amount of cash he had to tie up in stock for the video side.
*Handy tip for mixing small amounts of plaster: if you store it in plastic bags just add water to the bag and mix it by palpating the bag (oooh-er Missus!). We issued it in one pound bags with the instruction to add a pint of water per bag. You could practically guarantee an empty beer bottle near any crome scene to act as a measure.
I see the building industry caught up a few decades later with bags of ready-mix mortar with hose attachments. What a pity I never patented the idea.
"The winner will be desperately hoping that the Irish border issue can sorted because they can't run a third national election campaign on the promise that they'll 'implement the peoples wishes'."
I'd guess that whatever happens they'll run an election campaign* on the claim that they did implement the peoples' wishes. We're talking about politicians here.
*Probably ASAP and hope that they get to the winning post before it all unravels.
I can appreciate that for a business such as Cloudflare "we may be under attack" is the normal first-out-of-the-box reaction to a sudden problem. However when a change has just been rolled out the possibility that the change may have been responsible should take precedence. Rolling back the change, assuming that can be done quickly, should be a fairly obvious - and prompt - response. At the very least it triages the most likely cause over which you have control and in the worst case leaves you no worse of than before you rolled out the change.
"reading regexes (like SQL execution plans, it's more an art than a science)"
I wonder if it's possible to have a regex parser compile in test mode to give an execution plan. But I suspect the result would be a lot harder to understand than an SQL execution plan.
* You have a personal tracing device in your pocket RIGHT NOW (your phone).
Only when I remember to take it with me. And I minimise what's on it.
* You have listening devices in your home RIGHT NOW (Smart TV, digital assistant, games console...)
You might have them. I don't and won't. I can't imagine anything they'd be useful for. TV smarts are provided my MythTV and Kodi. I control them, not the other way around.
* You have behaviour monitoring devices RIGHT NOW (activity tracker, internet connect fridge, home automation...)
Nope. Again, can't imagine having a use for them. As to internet connected fridge - ROFLMAO.
* You are using facial recognition RIGHT NOW (Facebook, Windows, Apple...)
Facebook? Absolutely not. Windows, Apple? No, Linux..
* You are happy to be tracked RIGHT NOW (advertising)
Poor little A/C. Never heard of ad blockers, NoScript and all the rest of the armour the security minded use.
Apart from any other consideration has it not occurred to you that one of the requirements to live freely under the law is that the police should follow the law themselves? When it's considered likely that a challenge to their legality would likely be successful then we really should be concerned.
"They seem to be going through a learning curve which is knocking them about a bit but they are persevering so far. "
It's like Japan a few decades on.
"They're just making cheap copies of all the stuff we make."
...
"Oh, they're ahead of us."
The US, of course, doesn't like to admit it but it was also their getting on for a century or so before Japan.
"internationally he seems to be working long games"
Internationally I expect the Chinese to be working the long games. I'm sure they've already decided that they want to be in a position where they can't be vulnerable to export technology bans again. They'll accept the breathing space this has given them but will emerge not only as self-sufficient but also as a more complete competitor to the US.
"Nobody who sat on the Board of Serco Group, or who was part of the Executive Management Team at the time these offences were committed, works for the Group today."
I take it this includes whoever made the decisions. Will any bonuses be clawed back? Or have they moved on to other jobs or their pensions scot-free? Presumably it's just left to the shareholders, who include the pension funds the rest of us look to, to take the hit.
From my PoV it's about a week too late. Not that it was particularly difficult. I was changing from a PAYG to a low data cap sub and the new provider's rates ran rings round his. He started to explain that they "used somebody else's network". I just pointed out I was in the industry more than 30 years ago so I understood all that; it cut him off sharply - I didn't even need to point out that his own in-house MNVO did exactly the same thing or that even back then I knew the people doing his exact job.
I wonder what the real retention rates are and whether they justify the costs of running that side of the call centre. Perhaps this will actually save the operators money.
"This type of fraud doesn't exist as it would be simple to detect, simple to shut down and simple to send the directors to prison."
You could say the same thing about nuisance callers and yet we see it happening. If there's a line of fraud available someone will think they're good enough to try it. Never underestimate the power of the Dunning Kruger effect.
"deploy only encryption, particular only end-to-end cryptography, that can be cracked by American law enforcement"
This, of course, means they'll need to list encryption that they can break. By implication anything else woud be stuff they can't break. I'm sure a lot of people will be interested in that list.
I wish I could remember exactly how this worked but it was over 40 years ago back in the days of CP/M.
I'd built a microspectrophotometer. The computer consisted of a Z80 in a B I G S-100 box with MicroSoft FORTRAN (in those days MS had camel capitalisation). The printer, IIRC, was some sort of thermal teletype device.
Having acquired a spectrum I wanted to be able to print it whilst getting on with the lengthy task of acquiring the next one. There were a few spare K in high memory above the BIOS which started at 48K. Somewhere the video board had another small slice and either above or between them was some spare memory. AFAICR I shoved the data into this memory but I can't remember whether the code to sling it to the printer was also up there or whether it was part of the main executable. Whatever it was, once the user started the print option the printer would start plotting the spectrum with full stops and the console would be ready for the next command.
MicroSoft FORTRAN for CP/M had some handy borrowings from BASIC, PUT, GET, PEEK and POKE which made interfacing with H/W easy. I could make the spectrometer motor step and read the photomultiplier via the ADC without having to drop down into assembler.
"I suggest you are disgruntled"
Far from it. I did very nicely from that experience. I'd been body-shopped in there but then left, largely to go to another system-integrator with in theory, less of a commute (that was a whole other tale). However by the time the first client had learned the error of there ways I happened to bump into one of their guys in the tube station (so much for having escaped the commute into London) who promptly asked if I'd be interested in coming back as an employee which worked out very well in several respects.
"and have no experience in working in a software engineering business."
One of those irregular verbs:
I am a software engineer, you are a programmer, he/she is a script kiddie.
"Move on and find a better work place."
Indeed. It's called retirement even if the first decade was combined with freelancing.
"the short-sighted greed of the big media companies still stuck in the past."
Part of the past was the reinvention of physical media. Vinyl replaced shellac. Cassette replaced vinyl to some extent (with the slight problem that you could re-record your own copies of the vinyl). CD replaced vinyl and cassette. Each time they counted on being able to sell you another copy of what you'd already bought. The lack of a new physical distribution medium to replace CD together with the arrival of the means for users to rip the CD and transfer it to whatever digital store they want has hit them badly.
"you can take a single ad and see exactly how many people saw it, how many clicked on it, how many converted through it etc."
Can it also tell you how many were pissed off by seeing that ad yet again? How many were so pissed off they decided there and then that they'd never buy anything more from that advertiser?
Look again at what you wrote. Look carefully. Think about it. The only "data" in what you listed is the data the advertising industry uses to flog advertising services to the clients. What's more they're probably charging the clients to be provided with that "data".
"Then the more senior girls were given Marchants (which could multiply) but had a huge moving register,"
They could also divide which, with the moving register, was even more fun. We used those for statistics when I was a student (yes,it was a long time ago). They shuffled themselves along the bench doing division.
"some designers need serious reeducation."
And have for some time. It was just possible to change a headlight bulb on my '90s Legacy but the clearance between the back of the headlight and the windscreen washer bottle - or was it the coolant bottle? - made it very awkward. Designers of any piece of machinery should be required to do a strip and rebuild of the prototypes of their products.
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